Five years ago, when young people started walking out of school on Fridays to protest rising carbon emissions, some climate advocates felt a disconnect. The words commonly used to describe how fossil fuels have heated the planet—climate change, global warming—felt bland and understated. They didn’t catch the game. The young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg summed up the sentiment in a viral tweet: “Can we all please stop saying ‘climate change’ and instead call it what it is: climate condition, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological collapse, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?”
This kind of evocative language has already crept into news reports and political discussions as people agonize over whether “warming” sounds too pleasant, or whether “change” is too vague. In 2018, “climate crisis” became part of the name of a House Committee; the following year The Guardian adopted “global warming”. his newly seasoned vocabulary for climate coverageand Telemundo announced it would start using “climate emergency”.
The intuition was that the use of more dramatic language would cause more concern among the public. But, according to an emerging research group, these terms don’t seem to work as intended—and may even backfire.
If anything, generate “climate crisis”, “climate emergency” and “climate justice”. less concern than the phrases they were supposed to replace, according to a study published last week in the journal Climatic Change. University of Southern California researchers found that about 70 percent of US residents said they were concerned about “climate change” and “global warming,” compared to 65 percent for the “crisis” and “emergency” frame, and 48 percent for the “justice” frame.
Wändi Bruine de Bruin, the study’s lead author and a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, attributes this to the novelty of the supposedly more evocative terms. Only 33 percent of those surveyed said they had heard of “climate justice” before. “You can’t worry about something you’re not familiar with,” she said. The results suggest the term was polarizing, with just 23 percent of Republicans concerned about it, compared to 71 percent of Democrats.
The study, which surveyed more than 5,000 people, gave each person a series of questions containing just one of the five phrases. People were broadly supportive of climate-friendly policies, and were even willing to adopt low-carbon behaviors such as eating less meat, but the wording of the specific phrases did not change their answers much. “The thing is that many people are already worried about climate change, so worrying about the word for ‘climate change’ is probably not the key way forward to motivate people,” said Bruine de Bruin. Half of Americans now say they have personally experienced the effects of global warming, according to recent surveysand almost two-thirds are concerned about it.
Bruine de Bruin decided to investigate the effects of terminology after he found it the public was confused by jargon used by scientists and advocates, such as “mitigation” and “carbon neutral.” When presenting her research, Bruine de Bruin raised many questions about whether it would be more effective to use a term such as “climate crisis” or “climate emergency”.
Her findings are consistent with a previous study from 2021who found that reading those two phrases in news articles did not affect people’s emotional response to climate change, their support for policies to address it, or their belief that action can have an impact. In one case, researchers found that using “climate emergency” can make news organizations appear slightly less trustworthy.
More recent studies seem to point in a similar direction. In a preliminary paperresearchers at New York University analyzed the effects of 10 phrases – including contenders such as “carbon pollution”, “greenhouse effect” and “global cooking” – on more than 6,000 people across two studies, one spanning 63 countries and another in the United States. They found that most people responded that they were willing to engage in climate action, but the terms involved had no effect on their enthusiasm.
“The key takeaway is that focusing on compelling narratives, concrete and actionable information about climate consequences and solutions, can be more effective than relying on specific terminology to drive behavior change,” said Danielle Goldwert, a co-author of the preliminary study and a researcher at NYU, in an email.
It seems people don’t need special words to make them worry. What they may need more is concrete examples of meaningful action to take – goes deeper than a laundry list of hard-to-achieve items like “ditch your car” and “decarbonise your home” – and role models who can show them how to do it. Bruine de Bruin said that one possible reason why people who care about climate change may fail to act on their fears is that they feel alone in their concerns and unable to make a difference on their own. “If that’s true,” she said, “then communication needs to focus more on making it clear that we’re all in this together.”
